In 1990s Sarajevo, you didn’t casually cross the street. You ran from building to building. You used compact mirrors or shards of glass to check sightlines for the glint of a rifle scope. You could be bombed while waiting for bread.
While moms were dodging sniper fire to fetch a bucket of water for their families, Vedran Smailovic played at bombing sites and funerals. He didn’t want to be called a hero. He hated that term. He said he played to keep himself sane.
Above, he plays at the National Library.
Here in North America, we have an idea about what collapse or disaster looks like. It guides how we prepare for it. As more and more civilians wake up to our situation and become targets of the prepping industrial complex, which sells you everything from bugout kits to all kinds of weapons, this image shatters that myth.
That’s one reason I love it.
Relics of a past collapse
Travel to Ireland, and you'll notice random buildings all over the countryside. You might wonder how they got there. Who built them?
You might also see roads going nowhere.
They’re called the famine follies.
Survivors of the Irish famine built them. The buildings and roads often served no purpose. Local aristocrats simply hired peasants to lay stones in exchange for rations. Since there was nothing else for them to do, they had to keep everyone busy. The rich assumed that simply giving out food would corrupt their souls and make them lazy.
It didn’t matter if you were starving. If you were caught fishing or hunting on a lord’s property, you were arrested and deported. You might die in the process.
But you ask, why make everyone build useless infrastructure?
That wasn’t a bug in the system.
It was a feature.
The system that wants you to die
Under the Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Charles Trevelyan, it was illegal for famine relief work to construct anything that would interfere with private enterprise or “ruin” free market dynamics. They couldn’t build factories or warehouses. They couldn’t engage in restorative agriculture or open new fields. They couldn’t plant alternative crops. They couldn’t build grain silos. They couldn’t build piers for fishing.
They couldn’t “steal fish” from merchant vessels.
The British Treasury made it all illegal.
It blocked every survival effort.
The help that kills
American aid organizations sent endless crates of raw, unprocessed corn to Ireland and then patted themselves on the back for their humanitarianism. There was just one problem, and it was a big one. The Irish didn’t have mills to grind the corn.
They weren’t allowed to build them.
To make things worse, the British government wasn’t simply importing any kind of corn. They imported yellow flint corn. It was cheapest, and the hardest to process.
Irish citizens were so hungry, they tried to eat it boiled, roasted, ground with rocks but not fully milled, any way they could. The British government even sent out pamphlets telling them it was safe to boil the corn like oatmeal.
It wasn’t.
Half-boiled flint corn made them even sicker. In fact, historical records show that as many as half of the million fatalities didn’t result from direct starvation. They died from illness and disease trying to prepare food that was unfit for consumption. In many cases, it was the unground corn that was sent to save them.
Tragically, the corn wouldn’t have helped them anyway. Native Americans thrived on corn for thousands of years because they practiced nixtamalization. They soaked the corn in a special mixture to release all of its nutrients. Without this process, a diet consisting mostly of corn is not the same as a diet based on potatoes.
It will kill you.
At the time, the British government knew absolutely nothing about corn. It was completely new to them. Instead of learning, they squandered it.
In a nutshell, the Irish didn’t starve because there was no food. They starved because the British government deprived them of agency and decided to make them build roads to nowhere instead of grain mills.
That’s collapse.
The Temple wage and the Royal banquet
The bureaucrats that killed a million Irish used the same playbook over and over. A few decades later, they repeated the exact same mistakes during the Madras Famine in India. This time, at least 5.9 million died. Were they actually mistakes?
No, not really.
As Indian citizens starved, the British government exported more than 300,000 tons of wheat by rail out of the Deccan Plateau, the very area hit hardest by crop failures. Once again, bureaucrats cited free market dynamics as the reason.
This time, the British government went even further. They outlawed any kind of charity or donations that interfered with free commerce. If you were caught trying to give anything to the starving population, you were fined—even jailed.
During the peak of the famine, with thousands dying every day, the state government spent millions to host the Delhi Durbar, a weeklong banquet serving 60,000 politicians and bureaucrats in honor of Queen Victoria.
You might wonder how a coercive system like this maintains itself and why ordinary citizens didn’t simply rise up and overthrow their abusers.
Well:
Special Famine Commissioner Sir Richard Temple came up with a system called the temple wage. It was the famine follies all over again, with one important difference: Workers were exclusively allowed to work on projects that benefited Britain’s private enterprises, or the government’s military and financial infrastructure.
So the work was useful, just not for them.
These field offices and relief camps gave out one-pound bags of rice to laborers who toiled under the hot sun all day, digging canals or breaking rocks with a sledgehammer for endless hours. This kind of work easily burns 3,000 calories or more. Meanwhile, a bag of rice only provides 1,600 calories and little nutrition.
The temple wage was supposed to help. Actually, it wasn’t supposed to help. It was meant to diffuse the prospect of rebellion by making it look like there was a way out if people were “just willing to work hard enough.”
It only killed them faster.
The secret police that raid your stash
There’s a popular saying among preppers and survivalists that “nobody is coming to save you” during a long-term disaster or a social collapse.
Actually, it’s worse than that.
It’s popular—and comforting—to think about a total collapse of political and financial systems that leave everyone bartering and trading with silver dollars.
That’s almost certainly not going to happen.
During the Holodomor, the Soviet Union formed extensive squads of soldiers, militarized police, and radicalized locals. They literally went door to door across virtually every village throughout Ukraine, ransacking pantries.
They didn’t stop there.
They tore apart thatched roofs. They dug up yards. They pulled up floors. They smashed open walls. If a family couldn’t meet Stalin’s grain quota, they took everything of value they could find—especially their food. If they couldn’t transport it, they stomped on it. They dumped cooking pots of stew into fire pits. They shattered jars of pickled beets and cabbage. They burned a family’s seed stocks, so they couldn’t plant next year.
If you resisted giving up your land to collective farms, militarized police squads arrested you for hoarding. If you went insane from hunger and engaged in necrophagy (eating a corpse for survival), you were charged with cannibalism.
They didn’t leave you alone.
The first rule of famine club
When you see viral articles predicting things like collapse and famine, it’s actually a good sign. You see, history teaches you something important here.
If you’re allowed to talk about something…
It’s probably not happening.
When it’s actually happening, that’s when you’re not allowed to talk about it. Certainly not in a viral article or some clickbait video. The truth is censored. And when a government decides to censor something, they’re not going to mess around.
During famines, the Soviet regime implemented strict censorship laws against newspapers. They regulated public discourse. If you even said the word “hunger,” you were arrested and sentenced to years in a Soviet gulag. This was no joke. You were only allowed to use phrases like “food shortages” or “poor harvest.”
Woodrow Wilson’s administration did the same thing during the 1918 pandemic. If a newspaper dared to talk about the flu except in the most trivializing, minimizing terms, the U.S. government sued them into oblivion for “hurting morale.”
In fact, Wilson’s administration used the Sedition Act of 1918 to prosecute doctors and journalists who tried to warn anyone.
You could get up to 20 years in prison.
By the fall of 1918, right before the deadliest wave of the pandemic, doctors tried to publish editorials urging the public in cities like Philadelphia to take precautions ahead of Liberty Loan parades. Newspapers were so scared, they refused to print them.
Hundreds of thousands died.
The myth of OPSEC
A lot of preppers and survivalists talk about OPSEC, operational security, protecting your preps and stockpiles from prying eyes and curious minds. They talk about guns and ammo. They talk about setting booby traps on their property.
Once you’ve added reasonable defenses to your home, that’s it. You’ve done all you can do. If your worst fears come true, they won’t save you. Got solar panels? All someone has to do is take a hammer to your subpanel or your nice, expensive battery. All they have to do is push over your rain barrels. All they have to do is light a match and toss it in your vegetable garden. Someone will try, purely out of spite.
Look at Sarajevo in the early 1990s.
Good people had to band together to protect each other. Their threats ranged from gangs to snipers. These weren’t the unorganized roving bands that preppers like to fantasize about. They were highly organized mafias that ran crime rings.
If you tried to keep stockpiles of food or supplies, Sarajevo gangs would find out. They would track you down and kill you without hesitation. These gangs weren’t just desperate mobs. They were made of career criminals who decided to become warlords of disaster. They were already highly experienced and heavily armed.
To survive the gangs, you had to band together with your neighbors. In Sarajevo, the groups that did best were the Kucni Savjet, or neighborhood councils, that managed to keep the criminal networks at bay. They were tightly organized communities, ranging in size from a few dozen to a hundred people all living together.
The city tunnel and the water commandos
A journalist from New Jersey named Barbara Demick found out how a community survives a social collapse. She embedded with a Kucni Savjet of about 240 homes. They were mixed ethnicity, and they rejected the propaganda that tried to pit Muslims, Serbs, and Croats against each other. They stayed together.
These neighborhoods survived by pooling resources. They shared fuel and cooked big meals on community stoves. Some of them made bunkers in apartment basements. They set up their own mobile medical clinics and schools.
They eluded snipers who targeted water sources by training their youngest, fittest members into groups called water commando teams. Their job was to fetch water and bring it back for their entire group, not just themselves.
Civilian groups even dug a tunnel across Sarajevo to get in supplies. They started the tunnel in an ordinary home and came up in a garage in the middle of siege territory. They dug it by hand with picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows. This tunnel became known as one of the greatest examples of collective survival in modern history.
That’s how you survive.
You dig.
Frozen bank accounts and black markets
There’s only one way to truly secure yourself if your worst fears come true. You have to share what you’ve got. You have to be open about it.
You have to bring people in.
In 2001, Argentina’s economy collapsed overnight. The government made things worse by freezing everyone’s bank accounts. Ordinary citizens couldn’t withdraw their money for any reason. As you can imagine, panic ensued.
Stores closed their doors immediately.
It didn’t matter.
Ordinary citizens overran barricades and ransacked shelves. The government responded by deploying military police and federal troops. The bigger corporate chains hired armed, private security forces to guard their doors. When stores eventually reopened, they operated more like camps under heavy guard.
The government promised everyone they would be able to access their accounts in 90 days. In reality, they stayed frozen for a full year. Citizens were allowed to withdraw meager amounts for lifeline groceries, and that was it.
The entire country had to develop micro-economies of bartering and trading to get by. You weren’t going to do well sitting on stockpiles.
Just like in Sarajevo, warlords emerged. Criminal networks tracked anyone who didn’t look like they were suffering enough. They kept a close eye on anyone who wasn’t losing weight or looking disheveled. Those families became targets.
The highly organized crime groups that emerge in a collapse aren’t going to kill you for your coffee because they want to brew it.
They’re running black markets.
If someone tried to sit on stockpiles, their neighbors weren’t stupid. They noticed the same things. When the gangs came, neighbors left the selfish to fend for themselves. The ones who helped each other were the ones who fought off the criminals.
Did it work?
Yes.
Pots, pans, and kitchen brooms
In 2001 Argentina, neighborhoods formed groups called Asambleas Vecinales, neighborhood assemblies. They really did repel gangs.
They organized patrols and watch groups. The moment a criminal gang showed up, hundreds of neighbors began beating pots and pans to warn everyone. It also created a wall of sound that overwhelmed and drove off intruders.
These groups also formed civilian patrols. If a gang tried to break into a home or a store, a group of 40-50 showed up to defend it. They were armed with nothing more than baseball bats, brooms, and kitchen knives.
It was enough.
The community that snaps into being
There’s actually some great news in all this gloom.
Whether we’re talking about Sarajevo in the 1990s or Buenos Aires in the 2000s, you didn’t have to spend years preaching community for it to be there in a collapse. And often, it was the people in cities and neighborhoods that did the best.
Americans aren’t exempt from this. We have a history of cooperation in times of crisis. During the Great Depression, unemployed farmers and factory workers came together with skilled tradespeople to exchange goods and services. They fed each other. They fixed each other’s stuff. They didn’t turn on each other.
The collapse created the communities everyone needed to survive. You didn’t have to prophesize these groups into being. They happened.
So…
You don’t need a basement full of food buckets and a closet full of guns to survive. What you need is 50 neighbors with baseball bats and kitchen knives.
